I'm pretty new to Flash and am working on a background for my website (not online yet). i was wondering how others have designed applications, such as photo galleries, that automatically adjust to the resolution of the screen on which it's being viewed, as opposed to adding or removing scroll bars to view just a standard, presized bg image, as in HTML.

I assume this is a certain line of ActionScript, but like I said, I'm pretty new and am basically just guessing.

Using 100% width and 100% height in the HTML Publish settings will get you started. You may want to review Flash "Scaling" and "aspect ratio" here:

Here are examples of different scaling parameters available in the Publish settings. You can also add these parameters directly in the html (<param name="scale" value="noscale"). All the examples replace the actual Flash dimensions with 100% for both width and height (width="100%" height="100%"). These examples use the old <object> and <embed> to illustrate the different ways to scale Flash. Once you understand how it works I’d recommend that you use swfobject to place the Flash in your final project.

"exactFit" scales the file to fit exactly within the confines of the screen, irregardless if the movie becomes consequently distorted. The original aspect ratio is not maintained. So round things are not round and squares are not square.

"noBorder" causes the movie to be scaled to what ever dimensions are needed to have no border surrounding the movie within the player, which consequently could result in some of the movie being cut off from view. In other words, the movie will maintain the original aspect ratio and will fill the screen completely. But if the movie has to be streched wider to fill both sides of the screen, it will also stretch taller, but then some of the top and the bottom of the movie may be cut off from view.

"showAll" scales the movie to the size of the screen (which could cause pixelation if the file contains raster information), the difference between showAll and exactFit is that showAll mantains initial movie size proportions. Because it maintains the original aspect ratio, there can be space to the sides or the top and bottom. But everything always shows and they are not distorted. But notice the photo in the center, it becomes pixilated at larger screen resolutions.

The trickiest part of trying to go full screen is that it’s difficult to make the Flash wider without making it taller also, that is, to maintain the correct proportions or aspect ratio of everything on the stage. These methods are just simple scaling accomplished with html. There are also methods to dynamically scale the stage and it’s elements using Actionscript… but that’s a much more complex undertaking.